What is a DMARC record?

A DMARC record is the core of a DMARC implementation in which the DMARC record rulesets are defined. This DMARC record informs email receivers if a domain is set up for DMARC. If so, the DMARC record contains the policy which the domain owner wants to use. In essence, a DMARC record a DNS (Domain Name Service) entry. One can start using DMARC by implementing a DMARC DNS record. This DMARC record will be used by email receivers which have adopted DMARC. This will result in keeping track of all the messages which have been sent to your domain taking your DMARC policy into account.

The bottom line is that this will empower the organization publishing the DMARC record to instruct how non-compliance should be handled. The messages can be monitored (and delivered), moved to the junk folder or rejected.

DMARC example

This DMARC record can be placed in your DNS by your DNS manager. This can be an internal role in your organization, you can have access to a dashboard provided by your DNS provider or you can ask your DNS provider to place such a record.

You will need to set up a record for each of your domains on a predefined prefix, for example: _dmarc.yourdomain.com

The content of the record defines the address you’d like to receive the DMARC reports and the policy you want the email receivers to apply to the messages failing the DMARC checks. Register for a DMARC Analyzer account to generate an example DMARC record which will automatically point to our tool and start analyzing the statistics.

DMARC policies

When you’re using DMARC you can set up a policy to define how you want the receivers to handle emails which fail the DMARC checks.

You can choose one of these 3 DMARC policies:

none: Just monitor the results and do not take specific action for failing messages. Use this policy to start gathering DMARC reports and analyzing the data in these reports.

quarantine: Put the messages which fail the DMARC checks in quarantine. This mostly means that receivers will place these messages in the junk folder.

reject: Reject all messages which fail the DMARC checks. The receivers should do this ‘on SMTP level’ which means the messages will bounce directly in the sending process.

DMARC Record Check

DMARC Analyzer provides a free to use DMARC Record Check tool to display your record, test it and verify whether it’s valid. All you need to do to perform a DMARC check is provide your domain name. Our tool will then parse your DMARC record and will display the DMARC record along with some additional information.

Use the DMARC Record Check tool from DMARC Analyzer to test and look up your DMARC record.

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